In the space of a few weeks Israel has targeted Palestinian leader Yasir
Arafat, announced it will build 600 new homes in three large settlements
in the West Bank, (adding to "a settlement population that has been growing
at a rate of about 10,000 annually over the past three years" {1}), forged
ahead with plans to build a "security" wall that effectively annexes Palestinian
territory, attacked Syria, and left as many as 1,240 Palestinians homeless
after a raid on the Gaza town of Rafah killed eight, wounded 70, and saw
114 refugee shelters destroyed and another 117 buildings damaged {2}.

None of this produces much outrage anymore. It's just more of the same.

UN Security Council Resolutions are drafted to admonish Israel for its
bad behavior, but the US immediately presses its veto into service, while
Israel's supporters loudly denounce those bold enough to voice their dismay
at Israel's actions, accusing them of being anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic,
and worst, objectively following in the footsteps of Hitler.

"To Prime Minister Sharon," begins one letter of protest, your "government's
disproportionate use of force in the densely populated areas is not compatible
with international law. You better realize that you cannot forever play
deaf towards world public opinion. The day will come that you will have
to account for your deeds. Nobody is immune forever" {3}.

The letter ends, "Remember Pinochet." This is supposed to be a warning
-- not a particularly effective one. Pinochet is living a life of luxury
in Chile, addled perhaps, but free all the same.

Free too are: Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Wesley Clark,
George W. Bush, each key figures in wars of aggression, who have either
openly committed crimes against humanity or presided over the commission
of war crimes. There is no rule of law where war crimes tribunals are concerned,
no impartiality, no justice blindfolded, balance in hand. There is imperialism,
and tribunals for those who stand in the way.

How could it be otherwise? There's no overarching authority to see to
it that the leaders of the US are dragged from their homes in the dead
of night to be whisked away to The Hague to stand trial for bombing North
Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos or Libya or Bosnia or Serbia or Afghanistan
or Sudan or Iraq. Instead, the US and its underlings appoint themselves
cops of the world, and whisk their enemies to The Hague. Alternative mechanisms,
the International Criminal Court being emblematic, are readily undermined,
as Washington's refusal to sign onto the court, its blackmailing signatory
countries to exempt US nationals from prosecution, and the UN's granting
US citizens immunity in Iraq, readily attest.

So, if not an overarching authority, what? World opinion? Forget it.

While widely hailed as the world's second superpower, public opinion
didn't stop US and British troops marching on Baghdad, in whose wake have
followed 20,000 US contractors, to take advantage of a bonanza of profit
enhancing opportunities {4}. "People must be drooling," a former military
subcontractor in Bosnia said. "It's mind-boggling" {5}. Public opinion
is no match for mind-boggling economic opportunities.

Nor has the confirmation of the invasion being based on an outright
lie changed the course or nature of the occupation. The world spoke against
the war, the war's lies were exposed, and American firms fatten their bottom-lines.
And so it goes.

Still, for many people the hope is that public opinion can make some
difference. Hence the warning to Sharon: You can't ignore public opinion
forever.

But he can, and has. On top of remembering Pinochet, we can remember
Sharon, himself. He has a long history of stepping over the line, and his
infamous record includes the slaughter of Palestinians at the Sabra and
Chatila refugee camps, for which an Israeli commission of inquiry held
him indirectly responsible.

Even so, Sharon is free, and will almost certainly remain so for the
rest of his life. He may be on the wrong side of public opinion, but he's
on the right side of Washington's imperialism, and that's his stay out
of jail card. Get one of these, and you can freely kill, maim, slaughter,
assassinate, invade, torture, imprison, trample human rights, blow raspberries
at international law, and still earn plaudits for your devotion to peace,
and maybe even be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize someday. No one of consequence
will prosecute you, and anyone else who tries to will soon find themselves
undermined, marginalized or blocked.

Moreover, if you're on the right side of imperialism, you can be secure
in the knowledge that human rights leftists--marked by their penchant for
hurling the epithets monster, tyrant, dictator, warlord, strongman, thug
and Stalinist at their own countries' foreign policy bogeymen--will give
you a pass. They'd rather spend time chasing down someone who can be prosecuted,
which is to say renitent leaders of weak countries who are on the wrong
side of imperialism.

They will not write letters addressed, Dear Prime Minister, or Dear
President, to these leaders, and they will not importune them to please
respect international law, for to do so, they argue, would be to treat
demons as human beings. Besides, violations of international law are never
at issue in these cases, at least not on the part of the bogeymen. That
transgression, instead, falls squarely within the domain of imperialist
powers who say they must violate international law to hold monsters to
account, and are often applauded and backed by the same human rights leftists
for doing so.

Being on the wrong side of US imperialism (which usually comes down
to not giving foreign investors enough opportunities to drool) earns demonized
leaders a go straight to jail card.

Recent recipients: Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, who the
Canadian government is thinking of prosecuting for crimes against humanity.
Zimbabwe has little trade with Canada, which leaves Ottawa free to pursue
the Zimbabwean leader without opening its corporate sector to retaliation.
It can't, however, go after George W. Bush for crimes against humanity.
That would be suicidal. The economic arrangements that connect the two
countries give Washington a stranglehold on Ottawa.

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is another recipient of
the go straight to jail card, which is where he is today -- in jail, being
tried by a NATO kangaroo court. The very fact that Milosevic has been accused
of war crimes must mean he committed them, reason the intellectually-challenged,
while others figure that if he's being prosecuted, he must be guilty, even
if the political character of the tribunal is abundantly apparent. It's
astonishing that human rights leftists are absolutely convinced he's guilty
of all manner of crimes (including those he's never been indicted on) because
The New York Times, which they usually regard with great suspicion, says
he is, on the strength of war propaganda passed on by a NATO spokesman.
It seems that when the targets of Western imperialism are to be run through
the wringer, skepticism is held in abeyance, even by those who profess
to be anti-imperialist and wise to the ways of media distortion.

In recent days, Cuban leader Fidel Castro has been handed his umpteenth
go straight to jail card. Castro has long been hounded by Washington for
turning his attention to the material security of Cubans, and not the collective
bottom line of corporate America (the only collectivity that matters in
the US.) This time his presumed reason for running afoul of Washington
is the jailing of fifth columnists working with the US government to replace
Cuban socialism and its free health care, free education, and full employment,
with a different kind of "freedom": freedom from a job, freedom from economic
security, freedom from universally accessible health care, freedom from
universally accessible education; in other words, capitalist freedoms.

As an indication of the horrible fate that awaits Cuba if the Washington-mediated
transition to freedom and democracy is ever achieved, consider what the
New York Times calls the new challenge Washington faces in Iraq: Weaning
Iraqis of their "culture of dependency," {6} which means severing every
connection Iraq ever had to a primitive socialism.

Hidden behind the monochromatic portrayal of Saddam as thoroughly wicked
and Iraq as a Dantesque hell, lies a perspective at odds with pre-war propaganda.
While Washington's allies in the Middle East were pumping oil profits out
of their countries and into the US, Saddam Hussein was using oil revenue
to improve the material circumstances of Iraqis. The medical system was
the "jewel of the Middle East" {7}. The economy, or large parts of it,
was centralized, planned and state-owned (those parts now being sold off
before Iraqis have any say in the matter.)

In 1990, when the UN, with US prodding, decided that a regimen of war,
sanctions, and weekly air raids was necessary to return Iraq to the Middle
Ages, (the better to keep Iraq from challenging US domination of the Middle
East), the Iraqi government set up a food distribution program that involved
60,000 workers delivering "a billion pounds of groceries every month —
a basket of rations guaranteed to every citizen, rich or poor" {8}. The
program provided jobs and some measure of food security.

But with the country now under US occupation, the program is toast --
or about to become so. In place of food security and jobs, Iraqis will
be freed from their culture of dependency, a high-sounding outcome that
means nothing more than that tens of thousands will be free to look for
jobs that don't exist and the poorest will be free to starve.

The measure, however, won't hurt US contractors, who will continue to
drool, now even more so, for US occupation authorities having diverted
funds that would have filled Iraqi bellies to fill contractors' coffers.
Public opinion, whether Western or that of Iraqis, won't stop the wheels
of capital accumulation from turning. Nor will hunger. On the contrary,
hunger makes them turn more surely.

Nor will public opinion stop Israel from its drive to annex more and
more of historic Palestine. Writing a letter to Sharon asking him not to
use disproportionate force in Gaza is as effective as Italians having written
Hitler asking him not to use disproportionate force in the Sudetenland.
Public opinion couldn't check Hitler's march through Europe, and no one
would have been naive enough to suppose it would. So why expect public
opinion to stop Sharon? And why think that public opinion will deter the
US from its wars of conquest? Because Israel and the US are democracies,
and Nazi Germany wasn't?

A country's status as a democracy hardly seems to have any bearing on
whether public opinion makes a difference. Leaders of Western democracies
have made a fetish of ignoring public opinion, declaring with puffed up
pride that they take the hard and necessary decisions, not the popular
ones. And indeed, they often do ignore popular opinion. In the months before
US and British troops marched on Baghdad, Tony Blair was asked what he'd
do if a majority disagreed with his decision to commit British troops to
Iraq. He would simply work all the harder to bring the public onside, he
said. There was no question of his bowing to public pressure. That, it's
often pointed out, is not what leadership is all about. Others, including
Spanish President Jose Maria Aznar, backed the US-led invasion, over the
objections of a majority of their citizens. And Americans have long wanted
a single-payer health insurance program, need one, and can readily afford
one, but don't have one, and don't appear to be likely to get one anytime
soon. Few would deny that in the battle between the economic interests
of the corporate sector, and public opinion, economic interests have prevailed.
The US being a democracy hardly matters.

Still, it is naively believed, despite mountains of evidence to the
contrary, that politicians in Western capitalist democracies do what's
popular, and routinely pander to popular opinion. They don't. It's more
accurate to say that politicians manage public opinion as best they can,
while, at the same time, managing the advancement of the collective interests
of their country's corporate and investment sector. How could it be otherwise?
CEOs and senior managers rotate in and out of government. They manage political
campaigns. They raise and contribute the lion's share of funds to elect
candidates to office. By virtue of their control over the economy and its
strategic assets they're guaranteed the ear of government. By virtue of
their control over the media they're able to shape public discourse in
directions that benefit their collective interests. And the chances of
anyone being elected to a significant political office in a capitalist
democracy without at least arriving at a modus vivendi with capital, is
slim at best.

Once elected, those who occupy significant political offices perform
a balancing act, not balancing competing class interests, but seeing
to it that corporate interests prevail over those of the majority, while
keeping the public onside, or failing that, keeping it from rioting in
the streets and threatening to topple the whole edifice. Politicians who
can advance the interests of the corporate world, while keeping the majority
quiescent, and even supportive of their actions--and without recourse to
repressive measures--are highly prized. Deposed Bolivian President Gonzalo
Sanchez de Lozada -- a failure by these standards -- isn't among them.

But what if they fail to keep the public onside? To be sure, a public
that enthusiastically supports whatever measures its government advances
is preferable to one that merely acquiesces, but so long as the smooth
functioning of society doesn't grind to a halt, it's of little moment to
the corporate class, if the public doesn't like what its government is
doing, or if it's prepared to turf the current government from office in
the next election for offending public opinion. The next government will
almost certainly follow in the same direction.

It may, however, be objected that a politician who wants to be re-elected
hasn't a boundless latitude to ignore public opinion. Surely, he or she
is constrained at least a bit by what the public wants. Politicians
do pay attention to public opinion. That's undeniable. But their interest
isn't in public opinion as a guide, but as something to be managed. So
it is that popular opposition to policies doesn't always, or even often,
prevent elected leaders from implementing policies with which a majority
disagree. They take their chances in the next election, and often, despite
having been widely opposed in pushing through this measure or that, find
themselves re-elected, sometimes with handsome majorities. Being able to
raise a king's ransom to pay for a re-election campaign helps, and those
who have been the most assiduous in seeing to it that corporate interests
prevail over those of the majority find themselves handsomely supported
with campaign contributions. And if not re-elected, their replacement is
likely to be a near dead-ringer in policy-terms, as beholden to the corporate
class, and as much a part of it, as his predecessors.

These days it's difficult to defend the claim that public opinion is
a second superpower, and indeed there are few champions anymore, but all
the same, many are unwilling to let go entirely, insisting that while public
opinion didn't stop a war, it did change politics. This is grasping at
straws. Today, numberless people who marched in the streets to protest
an impending war on Iraq, are lining up behind a retired general who oversaw
the commission of flagrant war crimes in NATO's 1999 Kosovo campaign, has
written a book titled "Winning Modern Wars" and whose biggest problem with
the war on Iraq is not that it was fought, but that the backing of France
and Germany wasn't secured first. This is the "antiwar" candidate who's
whetted filmmaker Michael Moore's interest. Wesley Clark, if elected, will
almost surely follow in the same vein as George Bush, perhaps with more
finesse, with more charm, with more panache, but there will be no change
to corporate America getting rich on the backs of everyone else, and US
foreign policy will continue to be imperialistic. "A democratic republic
is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once
capital has gained control of this very best shell...it establishes its
power so securely, so firmly, that no changes, whether of persons...or
of parties...can shake it" {9}. It's an old idea, little encountered nowadays,
but deserving of resurrection.

The fact of the matter is that ordinary Americans are being screwed,
so corporate America can fatten its bottom line. Admittedly, this isn't
always clear. Many Americans believe the $87 billion price tag for reconstruction
and military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan amounts to an $87 billion
handout to Iraqis. "So many people in our country are hurting, needing,"
observed one American, "I just hate to see so much money going to look
after other people, when we can't seem to take care of our own" {10}. To
be sure, somewhere near one-fifth of the $87 billion will go toward the
reconstruction of Iraq. The country's civilian infrastructure being rebuilt
(after it was destroyed by American bombs and missiles) will incidentally
benefit Iraqis. But the direct and intended beneficiaries are Bechtel,
Halliburton and other corporate recipients of reconstruction contracts.
It would be more accurate to say, "With so many people in our country,
hurting, needing, I'd hate to see our money being given away to corporate
giants, first to build bombs to destroy other countries, and next to rebuild
the infrastructure the bombs destroyed."

Average Americans picked up the tab for the cruise missiles and the
bombers that wrecked Iraq's civilian infrastructure. Companies like Lockheed-Martin,
TRW, General Electric, Raytheon and Boeing, who pocket billions making
weapons of mass destruction, come out winners. And the destruction of Iraqi
power plants, sewage systems and water treatment facilities by the same
American weapons of mass destruction created a new reason to lavish corporate
America with reconstruction contracts. Had Iraq's oil facilities not been
in a state of disrepair, courtesy of over a decade of US bombing and sanctions,
revenue from sales of Iraqi oil would have gone straight to the bottom
lines of American contractors in Iraq drooling over the mind-boggling economic
opportunities. They still may. In this, there is no antagonism of interests
between Americans and Iraqis, but between corporate America on the one
hand, and ordinary Americans and ordinary Iraqis on the other. The former
profit, the latter foot the bill, some of them serving as corporate America's
foot soldiers, others getting bombed.

Imagine for a moment that Iraq hadn't been taken over. There would be
no danger from weapons of mass destruction, because Iraq didn't have any
(and if it did, does that mean Iraq had any intention of using them aggressively?)
The billions of dollars that Washington will collect from ordinary Americans
to give to Bechtel and its fellow contractors, on top of billions more
funneled to Lockheed-Martin and other WMD manufacturers to destroy the
facilities Bechtel and company will rebuild, could have been used at home,
not only to help the needy and hurting, but to help everyone. It could
have been used to provide jobs and freedom from the terror of being thrown
on the dole; to furnish everyone with free health care; to provide universally
accessible education for free, and freedom from worry about whether you
can send your kids to a good school and whether you can scrape together
enough to put them through college.

It would be nice if public opinion mattered, if letters to Ariel Sharon
had the power to deter Israel from its bad behavior, if peaceful demonstrations
involving millions could restrain the strong from crushing the weak. But
these things don't happen, much as we'd like them to. Israel's drive to
conquer all of historic Palestine will be stopped by the actions of Palestinians
themselves, and by Americans acting to radically reform the systemic imperatives
that drive the state to furnish Israel with the means of Palestinian oppression.
Want, economic insecurity, and imperialist wars will stop, when the majority
no longer wants the corporate class to carry on. At that point it will
be action that matters.

1. "Israel to Build 600 Homes in 3 Settlements; U.S. Officials Are Critical,"
The New York Times, October 3, 2003.